Tomato Update May 2020

I planted my tomato starters late last month, replacing the radish that where there for the first crop of the year. The onions in the photo below were started as multi-sown starters in February (I also start my tomatoes in February). Onions are a good companion plant for tomatoes and were planted with long term planning knowing tomatoes would be planted after the radish. You may also notice this is a no dig bed.

The tomatoes are of course now much larger than from my last tomato post. Side by side comparison:

And the tomatoes are already starting to flower now. Some suggest to nip off such early flowers, to allow the plant to spend early spring energy into building better roots today, so to help strengthen the plant to make better tomatoes tomorrow. This is often good advice. But these tomatoes have been in the ground for several weeks now, so probably have a good(enough) root system, so I will leave these flowers.

But… One can see, in the below image, that there are also inter-node shoots just below this flower cluster. Cutting off these side shoots also helps manage the tomato plant to create more fruit and make it easier to manage in a vertical trellis system as I have. So, yes, I did nip off these shoots.

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